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While most career advice focuses on how to succeed, we can all learn valuable lessons by dissecting career failure as well. Workplace experts offer insights into some of the top ways workers undermine their own careers and jeopardize their career development.

1. Not Taking Your Education Seriously

If you party too much in college and end up with a run-of-the-mill 2.5 GPA, you’ll be passed over for the best entry-level jobs, says New York City-based executive recruiter and coach Brian Drum of Drum Associates. Not finishing your master’s degree is another way to hurt your career development goals, adds Anne Angerman, a career coach with Denver-based Career Matters.

2. Not Having a Plan

In the current poor job market, you may have defaulted into a career you aren’t crazy about. That’s OK, as long as you develop career plans to get where you want to be. “Think of every job you take as a stepping-stone to your next job,” Drum advises.

3. Lying

You’ll lose professional credibility in a hurry if you lie, from exaggerating on your resume to getting caught fibbing on Facebook. “If someone calls in sick to work and then that evening posts a photo on Facebook of their extra day vacationing in Cabo San Lucas, that’s a big problem,” says corporate etiquette specialist Diane Gottsman of the Protocol School of Texas in San Antonio.

Social media can harm your reputation in other ways, too. Personal posts and tweets from work — when you’re supposed to be doing your job — can tag you as a slacker. And the content of your posts or tweets can come back to haunt you as well — you never know who might stumble upon those bachelor-party photos. “You need to assume that every boss and potential employer knows how to use Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, and post from the standpoint that everyone is watching even if in reality they’re not,” Gottsman says.

5. Not Respecting Professional Boundaries

Sharing TMI about your personal life with colleagues is unprofessional. “Your coworkers don’t want to hear about your fights with your husband,” Angerman says. On the other hand, if you’re ultraprivate and work with a chatty group, join the conversations occasionally so coworkers don’t resent you.

If you publicly bash fellow employees, the boss, the board of directors or even your competitors, you’ll be perceived as negative at best and a troublemaker at worst. The ramifications can be broad and long term, Gottsman says. “Industries are tight,” she says. “You don’t want to be the one who started that rumor about the head of your industry.” As far as bad-mouthing competitors — what if your company merges with a competitor, or you want to work for one someday?

7. Carrying on an Inappropriate Relationship with Your Boss

Never a good idea, but an especially bad one if your boss is married. “When you get involved in a drama or in something unethical that can be brought out in the open, you’re asking for trouble,” Gottsman says.

8. Not Controlling Your Alcohol Intake or Libido

Getting drunk at the office party or on a business trip damages your credibility. Ditto a romantic, ahem, “indiscretion” that your colleagues know about.

9. Job-Hopping Just for the Money

Job-hopping — in moderation — may not automatically disqualify you from a position. “But it gets to the point — like if you have seven or eight jobs by the time you’re 35 — that employers are not going to want to invest in you,” Drum says. Also, if you have leadership aspirations, keep in mind that the top dogs of many large corporations have been with those organizations for long periods, he says. Additionally, many companies have “last in, first out” layoff policies, which could leave you out of a job if you never stick around long enough to build tenure anywhere.

10. Losing Touch with References

You’ll kick yourself later if you leave a job without collecting personal contact information from colleagues who can serve as professional references for you in the future. “If you were forced to leave a job and you can’t ask your boss for a reference, hopefully you’ve built up some rapport with a colleague and can ask them,” Angerman says.

11. Leaving a Job on Bad Terms

Don’t become a lame duck when you’ve got one foot out the door, Drum says. “The employer only remembers about the last five minutes you were there,” he says. Give proper notice and don’t leave a mess behind. And by all means, do not make a huge dramatic production of it when you quit, complete with cursing, slandering and throwing things, Gottsman advises. “It’s very difficult to get another job when you’ve left destruction in your wake,” she says.

“A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just. …A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

More than 10,000 people died in the Afghanistan War last year alone. This year, the government plans to spend $107 billion on the war. We believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would repeat his admonition to U.S. policymakers on their responsibility:

“I speak as one who loves America…The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., was a national hero who called on us to have the moral courage to stop another war that wasn’t making us safer and that wasn’t worth the cost. Help us fight the Pentagon lies. Spread the truth by sharing this video with your family and friends.

Mountaintop removal coal mining is destroying the mountains and threatening the health and lives of communities across Appalachia. But people in Appalachia are standing up and today they need your support.

Residents of Blair, West Virginia have noticed increased activity from mining company Arch Coal around Blair Mountain — site of the largest labor uprising in American history. Residents are becoming increasingly concerned about Arch’s activities and fear they will move forward with plans to mine the historic location.

Arch Coal has four planned operations on Blair Mountain, some of which intrude onto the battlefield. Today, this multi-billion dollar company will announce its profits from the fourth quarter of last year. Whatever those earnings are, the company has a responsibility to the community in which it operates.

Folks in Appalachia won’t stand for Arch Coal’s plan to destroy their community and our nation’s history just so the coal company can increase its profit margin, and we shouldn’t either.

To allow Arch Coal to destroy Blair Mountain would be to tear out a crucial page of American labor history and burn it. But even more important than the history are the lives of the people living at the foot of this mountain today.

In Java last year, I interviewed two men with identical stories of being lured away from their hometowns with the promise of well paid work by Cargill supplier Kuala Lumpur Kepong (KLK).

The two were exposed to toxic chemicals in the palm oil fields with no protection and kept under lock and key at night by armed security. Each finally escaped these horrendous slave labor conditions without ever being paid.

I need your help to convince Cargill to stop filling America’s food supply with palm oil that causes environmental and human rights violations like these.

You’ve already been a massive help in putting Cargill on the path to protecting Indonesia’s rainforests. Just last week, Cargill announced it will finally be offering North American customers palm oil certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Just two years ago Cargill claimed this was impossible. Your pressure made it happen. Thank you.

We’ve clearly got a few more steps to go to ensure Cargill’s on the right side of rainforests, and I’m asking you to take those steps by my side.

Thanks to the women in this room and people all across the country, we worked really hard — and it’s now been more than three years since Congress passed the Affordable Care Act and I signed it into law. It’s been nearly a year since the Supreme Court upheld the law under the Constitution. And, by the way, six months ago, the American people went to the polls and decided to keep going in this direction. So the law is here to stay.

I’ll do everything in my power to make sure nothing like this happens again by holding the responsible parties accountable, by putting in place new checks and new safeguards, and going forward, by making sure that the law is applied as it should be — in a fair and impartial way.

They exemplified the very idea of citizenship — that with our God-given rights come responsibilities and obligations to ourselves and to others. They embodied that idea. That’s the way they died. That’s how we must remember them. And that’s how we must live.